(Other) “German Efficiency” – Germany will physically inspect its gold reserves worldwide.(Cnbc).A German federal court has said that country’s central bank should conduct annual audits and physically inspect its gold reserves worldwide, including gold in the custody of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. In addition to the FRBNY, Bundesbank gold is stored in London, Paris and Frankfurt. For decades, the Bundesbank has relied on written confirmation of its gold holdings in London, Paris and New York. According to the report from the German audit court, the last time Bundesbank officials physically inspected the central banks gold holdings was, well, never. (It should be stated that the folks at FT Alphaville quote a report saying an inspection took place in 1979/1980.) Interestingly enough, the Bundesbank is apparently quite happy with taking the word of other central bankers about the existence, location and size of its gold reserves. It put out the word that it disagrees with the Audit Court, which only has advisory power and cannot force the Bundesbank to follow its recommendations, about the need for inspections. Nonetheless, the Bundesbank is actually going to follow the recommendation that it verify the gold stocks. It also has plans to ship some 150 tons of gold back to Germany for a more “thorough examination.”Hmmmmmm……..Read the full story here.

The following was published (April 9th 2011) during the first week of the baseball season: Major League Baseball plays a long season, and the Red Sox may yet turn it around after losing seven games and winning just one in their first eight. But at the moment. it’s not looking so good for the “experts.” Sports Illustrated predicted the Red Sox would win 100 games and win the World Series. At ESPN, 33 of its 45 pundits predicted the Red Sox would win the World Series.…If it’s this hard to predict baseball, imagine how hard it is to forecast developments in other complex systems. The Federal Reserve tries to fine-tune the performance of the nation’s economy through monetary policy.

Climatologists try to forecast how warm it will be 50 or 100 years from now and what that will do to sea levels. Predictions in complex systems are hard. That doesn’t mean they should never be attempted or acted upon, just that they should be treated with the skepticism they deserve. DOUBLE CHOKE! A Mad World: by Gary Jules:

Once_the_Federal_Reserve was transparent it was found that the Rothchilds and the elders of Zion had nothing to do with banking at all. The public went into a panic when they realized that all the covert buying and selling was done by the Oompa-Loompas.

Are the gold bars in Fort Knox really made of the precious metal? Or has the U.S. government secretly sold off the nation’s stockpile and replaced it with metal bars that are only painted gold?Ron Paul wants to find out.Giving legitimacy to an Internet conspiracy theory that the gold in Fort Knox is fake, the iconoclast Republican congressman from Texas has asked adminstration officials to audit the purity of the nation’s 700,000 gold bars held in Fort Knox, according to an internal Treasury document obtained by CNBC.

The Treasury document says it would cost about $15 million to conduct an audit. The process would take about 30 minutes to verify the gold content of each bar, or 350,000 man hours; to do that would would take 400 people working for six months, according to the document.

Really, you should save the money. If this guy become president, he may need it.

The US Federal Reserve has said the US economy is recovering moderately, newly released minutes of its April policy committee meeting show. The central bank said this was despite an unexpected slowing of growth in the first quarter. It said large increases in food and energy prices has pushed up inflation, but it expected the cost of living to remain stable in the long-term. The Fed’s policy makers also discussed “normalising” monetary policy. Committee members agreed to keep interest rates unchanged at between zero and 0.25%. They also voted to continue with the bank’s $600bn (£375bn) Treasury bond-purchase plan until the end of June. The programme is the Fed’s second round of “quantitative easing”, dubbed QE2. Although they discussed raising interest rates, they stopped short of making any decisions and said exceptionally low interest rate levels would be warranted “for an extended period”. Some members of the board said the recent rise in inflation had been fuelled by significant energy price rises and other commodity prices. While the minutes also showed that one committee member suggested that excess liquidity (money) in the system could be creating speculation in commodity markets, pushing up commodity prices. The Federal Reserve mentioned the earthquake in Japan in March, and said it expected GDP to be affected in the near term. Figures released earlier this week showed that US manufacturing fell for the first time in 10 months in April, primarily due to a shortage of parts as a result of the Japanese disaster. The central bank said conditions in the labour market were continuing to improve gradually. But activity in the housing market remained weak, with demand for housing “depressed”. via bbc.co.uk

…but inflation won’t happen right away. They have all their fingers in the dam. This “Normalizing” sounds peculiar. Quantitative easing is more like quantitative pleasing of the electorate in time for elections.Looks like energy could be the achilles heal…

Prepare yourself for a sum mertime inflation shock. An expert who helps put together the government’s Consumer Price Index (CPI) says that the closely-watch inflation gauge could rise abnormally “after June.” In a phone conversation I had soon after a 0.4 percent increase in consumer prices for April was announced last week, this expert — who I can’t name — confirmed that the CPI is again understating energy prices. And, again, the computers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which collect this data, will correct that mistake in the next few months.

That 0.4 percent overall increase in April included a seasonally adjusted 3.3 percent jump in the price of gasoline. But before that adjustment, the CPI really showed gasoline inflation more than twice as bad with an increase of 7.5 percent. The same thing happened in March. The government seasonally adjusted the increase in gasoline down to 5.6 percent when, unadjusted, it was really 11.7 percent.

her trophy Pulitzer so she can have an excuse to say Obama should invade Israel

Lee Bollinger, Columbia University’s $1,753,984-a-year president who also serves as chairman of the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has an article in Bloomberg Businessweek arguing that the Federal Communications Commission should force cable companies to carry Al Jazeera. He describes access to the channel as “critically valuable” to “our democracy” and to “America’s understanding of the world.”

This is ridiculous. Anyone who wants to see what Al Jazeera English has on offer can easily visit its Web site. One can find an article by an American responding to the recent murder of Israeli children by writing that “Netanyahu has never condemned or even expressed remorse over the killing of 300 plus Palestinian children by the IDF during the Gaza war. (In fact, one would be hard pressed to find any Israeli government that ever even criticised the killing of Palestinian children by the IDF, although many hundreds have been killed over the last decade).” One can find an article by a Columbia professor asserting that “a ‘manly’ and ‘straight’ heteronormativity was manufactured for ‘Arabs'” and calling for humans to transcend “obscene class divisions.”There’s no disclosure at all to Bloomberg Businessweek readers that Mr. Bollinger and Columbia have some substantial ties to the al Thani family that owns both the country of Qatar and Al Jazeera. A Columbia art exhibit Web site acknowledges the support of “The Arab Museum of Modern Art, Qatar and the Qatar Foundation, Her Excellency Sheikha al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, and His Excellency Sheikh Hassan bin Mohammed bin Ali Al Thani.” ABC News reported “the Qatari princess went to college at Duke University in North Carolina and is now pursuing a masters at Columbia University in New York.” Mr. Bollinger has shown no hesitation in the past when it comes to accepting donations from undemocratic or unfree Arab countries; Columbia took money from the United Arab Emirates that Harvard refused to accept. If Americans are looking for an Al Jazeera-type perspective they don’t even need the American government to force Al Jazeera onto their cable television; they can just go enroll in Columbia’s Middle East studies department, at least one of whose professors Mayor Bloomberg’s own administration has adjudged unworthy of training New York City public school teachers.The whole column is an embarrassment to both Mr. Bollinger (who is apparently difficult to embarrass) and Businessweek. It’s not clear what is so special about Al Jazeera that it deserves to be forced by the U.S. government onto American televisions. Does Mr. Bollinger want every foreign television channel whose owner is a major Columbia donor or potential one to be forced by the American government onto American television?Mr. Bollinger is a paid director of the Washington Post Company, which owns a cable television company that serves 720,000 customers in 19 states. If he thinks it’s so vitally important to American democracy for all Americans to watch Al Jazeera, let him speak up at the next Post board meeting and earn his directors fees by forcing Al Jazeera into the cable package of all of his own company’s customers, rather than asking the government to impose the channel on the rest of us.

Cable ONE is a United States cable service provider and subsidiary of The Washington Post Company, functioning as its own self-contained corporation within its parent company. The company’s name and current focus dates back to 1997; prior to that time the company was known as Post-Newsweek Cable. It is headquartered in Phoenix, Arizona.[1]Cable ONE is the 10th largest cable provider [2] in the USA with most subscribers residing in small rural communities in nineteen midwestern, southern, and western states. As of January 2009, about 699,000 subscribers receive basic service and about 230,000 receive digital video service from Cable ONE. The company offers broadband Internet to over 370,000 subscribers. [3] In May 2006, Cable ONE began a system-by-system launch of its digital telephone service with currently about 94,000 subscribers. Cable ONE is the only major cable provider that maps subchannel numbers same as digital cable box channel numbers. [4] via en.wikipedia.org